The Globalization of Poverty and the New World Order
by Michel Chossudovsky
In this new and expanded edition of Chossudovsky’s international
best-seller, the author outlines the contours of a New World Order which
feeds on human poverty and the destruction of the environment,
generates social
apartheid, encourages racism and ethnic strife and undermines the rights
of women. The result as his detailed examples from all parts of the
world show so convincingly, is a globalization of poverty.This book is a skilful combination of lucid explanation and cogently argued critique of the fundamental directions in which our world is moving financially and economically.
In this new enlarged edition –which includes ten new chapters and a new introduction-- the author reviews the causes and consequences of famine in Sub-Saharan Africa, the dramatic meltdown of financial markets, the demise of State social programs and the devastation resulting from corporate downsizing and trade liberalisation.
Michel Chossudovsky is Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), which hosts the critically acclaimed website www.globalresearch.ca . He is a contributor to the Encyclopedia Britannica. His writings have been translated into more than 20 languages.
Published in 11 languages. More than 100,000 copies sold Worldwide.
"In its entirety, the book can and should be read by all with an interest in world peace and the causes of poverty." Frances Hutchinson, The Ecologist
"This concise, provocative book reveals the negative effects of imposed economic structural reform, privatization, deregulation and competition. It deserves to be read carefully and widely." Choice, American Library Association (ALA)
"The current system, Chossudovsky argues, is one of capital creation through destruction. The author confronts head on the links between civil violence, social and environmental stress, with the modalities of market expansion." Michele Stoddard, Covert Action Quarterly
"This detailed study by an economics insider shows the consequences of "reforms" in various parts of the world, reveals a clear pattern of callous neocolonialism. Definitely red-pill material." Richard K. Moore, Whole Earth.
"As Michel Chossudovsky, author of The Globalisation of Poverty, has pointed out, an entirely undemocratic world body "has been casually installed in Geneva, empowered under international law with the mandate to 'police' country level economic and social policies". This amounts to a "repeal of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights", providing "legitimacy to trade practices which border on criminality [including] the patenting of human life forms". John Pilger, New Statesman.
"More than just an austerity program, Chossudovsky believes the conditions the IMF demands of countries - with little choice but to accept - are draconian...He also believes the IMF is getting its direction from the wealthy Wall Street investment banks which act as informal policy advisers and more formally, help structure and deliver bailout packages. "There are powerful financial actors behind this," he says. While Chossudovsky, author of The Globalization Of Poverty, is careful not to suggest a conspiracy, he says large multinational corporations and investment houses benefit from the chaos in countries like South Korea and Indonesia once their currencies are devalued." Laura Eggertson, The Toronto Star
"Michel Chossudovsky is one of the leading intellectuals of the antiwar movement, perhaps the best, as I find he works his tail off in documenting the material he presents and is rigorous in his analysis." Jude Wanniski, Polyconomics.
"Chossudovsky gives us a clear analysis of how the International Monetary Fund has well served this corporate plan. He gives us case studies of the ''restructuring'' and subsequent impoverishment of the people in countries like Somalia, Peru and Russia. He lays out the blueprint for the rest of the world." Briarpatch
"... I recommend to all interested in our political and financial future, unemployed or in work, to buy or borrow, one of the most informative books on the consequences of global poverty, written by Michel Chossudovsky." Stan Kent, Scunthorpe Evening Telegraph
"University of Ottawa economist Michel Chossudovsky calls our era a global ''cheap labour economy''. The underlying problem is only made worse by IMF-sponsored reforms that impoverish millions of people. Economic Justice Report
"Michel Chossudovsky, offers in his book The Globalisation of Poverty an impressive presentation of the destructive effects macroeconomic restructuring has had on Yugoslavia and its 24 million people." Paul Surlis, National Catholic Reporter
Read Review of First Edition
Read Review of First Edition (Covert Action Quarterly)
Reviews by readers who purchased the First Edition
Reviews by readers who purchased the Second Edition
Recent Amazon Reviews of the Second edition
"Battling Mainstream Economics" by Juliet ONeill (Biographical sketch of Michel Chossudovsky), Ottawa Citizen
Read mainstream media review: The Voice of America (VOA)
Links to Michel Chossudovsky's writings (Google Search)
See also Michel Chossudovsky's book entitled America's War on Terrorism, 2nd Edition
Michel Chossudovsky is the
2003 Recipient of the Human Rights Prize of the Society for the
Protection of Civil Rights and Human Dignity, Berlin, Germany.
Globalization of Poverty,
(German edition) was classified No. 2 in the Top Ten "best" non-fiction
titles in Germany, July 2002, by a panel of writers, journalists and
scholars.
He is seven times recipient of the Project Censored Award
, Sonoma University School of Journalism, California (2000 (double
award), 2001 (double award), 2002, 2004, Nominated for 2005). His
website, Global Research (Canada)
was granted the Democracy Media Award in 2002, 2003 and 2004 by GoodWriters.net.
The Globalization of Poverty in
its First and Second editions has been published in eleven languages.
Ten English language editions and co-editions in the US, UK, Canada (2
editions), Australia, Malaysia, South Africa, India, Philippines (2
editions)), French (2 editions), German, Spanish, Portuguese (two
editions, Brazil and Portugal), Finnish, Turkish, Japanese, Korean,
Italian (2
editions), Arabic.
Order Now. List price US$24.95 Our price:
Online: US$18.00 (400 pages).
Bio of Michel Chossudovsky published in the Ottawa Citizen (5 Jan 1998)
Battling Mainstream Economics
by Juliet ONeill
The URL of this article is: http://globalresearch.ca/articles/ONE311A.html
The faint moans of his daughter's cello practice barely break the hush of Michel Chossudovsky's household.
The kitchen, bathed in winter light, is gleaming. It is here, at a well-worn wooden table, that the University of Ottawa economics professor wants to talk.
The sunken-leather sofas of the living room -- with its gallery of African masks, Peruvian pottery, Chinese teapots and other treasures from some of the 100 countries he has visited --would be "too comfortable."
Stiff-backed chairs do feel more appropriate for the subject at hand: How poverty is increasing around the world and how this is not by accident, but by the design of a small, powerful banking and business elite at whose behest the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have provoked "economic and social collapse" in many countries.
The discussion is about widespread complacency toward what Mr. Chossudovsky calls a global financial crisis -- in which private speculators wield more power than governments over central bank coffers -- that may swerve into a crash far worse than the Dirty Thirties, jeopardizing pension and retirement savings funds.
It is about how so many people, expert and layman alike, accept a dominant "neo-liberal" economic dogma which makes suffering and sacrifice -- from unemployment and social service cuts in Ontario to mass destitution in Russia -- seem inevitable, if not justifiable and acceptable.
"Absurdity," he says. "I have difficulty in understanding why the dismantling or closing down of productive assets -- hospitals and schools -- could constitute the key to prosperity. But that is what is actually being conveyed. The official mainstream economic agenda is that you have to close down, downsize, lay off, and that is the key to prosperity."
Mr. Chossudovsky, a 52-year-old author who has learned to speak 10 languages and writes in three (English, French and Spanish), has persisted for three decades with an increasingly unfashionable perspective on world events.
It keeps him on the margins of mainstream commentary in Canada but wins praise from such equally anti-establishment social theorists as American Noam Chomsky.
He agrees to being described as having a leftist perspective, but emphasizes that he is not allied with any political party, including socialists, at home or abroad.
"One doesn't know who the socialists are any more because the socialists are all in favour of the neo-liberal agenda," he says. "If you look at socialists in Europe, what are they doing? They're adopting austerity measures. I wouldn't want to put a political label on myself because the neo-liberal consensus is supported by right-wing and left-wing parties alike, including the New Democratic Party."
Raised in Geneva, Switzerland, Mr. Chossudovsky followed in his father's footsteps by becoming an economist. But his father, a Russian emigre, made a career as a United Nations diplomat, while Mr. Chossudovsky put his economics training to use as a teacher and analyst. He came to the University of Ottawa in 1968, attracted by the promise of a bilingual lifestyle.
It was as a young visiting professor at the Catholic University in Santiago, Chile, that Mr. Chossudovsky's interest in "economic repression" was first pricked.
Augusto Pinochet's military junta, which overthrew Salvador Allende in 1973, quadrupled the price of bread and introduced other measures that would now be referred to as "a structural adjustment program."
Mr. Chossudovsky set out, with a doctor, to study the malnourishment resulting from the bread price hike. He wound up with a paper that held the Pinochet regime responsible not only for conventional forms of political repression but for "economic repression" that impoverished three-quarters of Chile's population.
Since then he has documented the purposeful impoverishment of people in dozens of countries. His latest book, the Globalization of Poverty, contains case studies of the collapse of economies and social structures in Somalia, Rwanda, Vietnam, India, Brazil, Peru, Russia and the former Yugoslavia. In some of these countries, IMF/World Bank intervention preceded violent conflict.
He refers often to "the hidden agenda" of the big banking and financial organizations. They orchestrate collapses, he says, by demanding payment of debt service charges and then lending money to cover the charges but only on condition the recipient country impose such measures as austerity, privatization and currency devaluation. The impact is usually destructive: mass shutdowns, huge unemployment, a wipeout of savings and pensions and purchasing power, a loss of social services.
Such economic shock therapy, he says, has pushed Russia, for one, "back to the medieval era," impoverishing millions of people, deepening the country's foreign debt, driving more than half the country's industrial plants into bankruptcy and allowing organized crime to flourish in the banking, real estate and other sectors of the economy.
Mr. Chossudovsky generally condemns "the criminalization" of the global economy in which increasingly large amounts of drug money and other illegally obtained funds are deposited in the world's 55 offshore havens, escaping taxation. The funds are laundered through an international banking system in which capital movement is easier than ever owing to the revolution in digital communications.
"This critical drain of billions of dollars in capital flight dramatically reduces state tax revenues, paralyses social programs, drives up budget deficits and spurs the accumulation of large public debts," he writes.
An end to offshore tax havens is one of the few solutions Chossudovsky advocates. He also says the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and commercial banks should not be allowed to "pillage" the central banks of troubled countries.
He is much stronger on description than prescription. But his descriptions alone constitute a defiance of mainstream economic scholarship in which "critical analysis is strongly discouraged."
It has not, however, stopped him from teaching for 30 years at U of O and as a visiting professor in several other countries, as well as publishing several books, the latest appearing in nine languages. And while the mainstream media in Canada do not publish his commentary, he is published frequently in Le Monde Diplomatique and smaller magazines that don't have investors or business advertisers.
Prof. Michel Chossudovsky has documented impoverishment of people in dozens of countries.
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